The NRA’s ad was just… strange, but the rebuttal was brilliant. To those of us on my side of the Atlantic your (ie Americans’) obsession with owning guns is and always has been both bizarre and incomprehensible. Good luck with sorting it out.

To those of us on my side of the Atlantic your (ie Americans’) obsession with owning guns is and always has been both bizarre and incomprehensible.

The ONLY reason I can give is that target shooting is actually pretty fun. Other than that reason, it’s a pure power trip on the part of gun owners who just want to be able to shoot any damn blackshooded assailants armed with candy.

The ONLY reason I can give is that target shooting is actually pretty fun. Other than that reason, it’s a pure power trip on the part of gun owners who just want to be able to shoot any damn blacks hooded assailants armed with candy.

Target shooting with rifles (but not handguns) is allowed in the UK. The proviso being you have to keep your weapons and ammunition locked securely away at a shooting range.

Rachel Maddow’s comment on the NRA ad last night was just right. When the NRA and other right-wing groups make ads like this, they’re trolling for the benefit of their crazy base. Anything that pisses off the liberals has got to be good, and the group that pisses off the most liberals is the best.

See, they know they are, and we know it’s true as well. It is no surprise at all.

Not only is a huge swath of the country ideologically blinkered, but they’re under-educated, sheltered from the wider world, xenophobic and suspicious of anyone or anything that’s not “local” (read: anyone in my local circle is ipso facto good, and outsiders are furrin’ and out to take my stuff), and utterly incompetent at the most basic critical reading of media messages. This is a direct result of the appalling public education system. Combine that with the extraordinarily parochial character of USAians on average—-a stunningly low number have ever been outside the US—and it’s obvious why this bullshit works.

If you wonder why a tragedy leads to calls for taking away freedom, just remember that SAFTEY has come to mean that before boarding an airplane everyone must walk a Rat Maze, then take off their shoes and allow a full body x-ray.

Like a house fly drenched in DDT the NRA’s nervous system is in meltdown.

And like most organizations that verge on the religious they are given to desperate, pathetic. ridiculous, atrociously bad taste and incoherent argument when cornered.

I have no idea if Obama will get any measures let alone affective ones through the governmental sexually inadequate dinosaurs that haunt the house and the senate, but if any meaningful measure can be passed, now is the time!
And the NRA know it!, and they are not perky bunnies, just bitter and all pouty that some of their bestest toys might be confiscated.

I do wish the American society all the luck in that struggle, but their children deserve a world that is not governed by who has the biggest flashiest gun or who is the pathologically insane with one.

If you wonder why a tragedy leads to calls for taking away freedom, just remember that SAFTEY has come to mean that before boarding an airplane everyone must walk a Rat Maze, then take off their shoes and allow a full body x-ray.

For the millionth time: being allowed to wave a gun in the face of everyone who knocks on your door or “looks threatening” or looks threateningly at you is not a fucking freedom.

Er, that doesn’t sound good. Was supposed to write right.
Or make the sentence:

For the millionth time: not being allowed to wave a gun in the face of everyone who knocks on your door or “looks threatening” or looks threateningly at you is not taking away any basic freedom. It is a reasonable restriction on your freedom to threaten strangers.

thinking things all the way through is not something that seems very common in The U.S. , the only country I am very familiar with. It is not just in politics or the media either but is all too common it seems even in the boardrooms of major financial corporations.

I would like to live long enough to see a more rational reality based society develop but probably wont.

Let’s see, the President and his family gets dozens of death threats a day. The average family gets zero. So yeah, they need armed guards because there are a bunch of nuts out there with guns who would kill them otherwise.

So at a time when every rightwing nut thinks that our taxes are too high, their solution to the problem it to spend at least 30,000 ~ 40,000 per building per school district to prevent a crime that is extremely rare. Just from my experience, the district that I went to had eight elementary school buildings, one middle school, and one high school. So during the thirteen years (K-12) I was there, the district would have spent $4,500,000, to prevent exactly zero crimes. Further more, the more armed guards you have the higher the chances that one of them makes a mistake and kills a student. Having that many armed guards, it’s likely that every year more kids will die because of the guards than because of mass shootings.

I understand armed guards at high risk schools, or in high risk situations, but there have to be better ways of dealing with the problems.

Or do they think that they can get armed security guards on the cheap, maybe pay them $7/hour without benefits. Which is a brillant idea, because that is what our schools need more of are armed, bored, disgruntled workers.

I understand armed guards at high risk schools, or in high risk situations, but there have to be better ways of dealing with the problems.

Speaking from outside the USA, it seems that none of the high profile mass shootings in schools I’ve seen reported would be in ‘high-risk’ schools or situations. Given that, how would you choose where to send the guards? Frankly the whole idea if scary/mad/creepy (disclosure, I own a hunting rifle).

Or do they think that they can get armed security guards on the cheap, maybe pay them $7/hour without benefits. Which is a brillant idea, because that is what our schools need more of are armed, bored, disgruntled workers.

I spent a week staying in a resort complex in Mexico a few years ago. My friend (a local) who we were staying with was buying the security guards soft-drinks on hot days (i.e. all the time). When I asked what that was all about he replied that they were working 12-hour days, armed with shotguns and they earned about the cost of the soft drink per hour. He figured an investment in goodwill was in order.

Put an armed guard in every school building and sooner or later one of them will be a mass shooter.

The link you provided suggests that Sidwell Friends does have security guards, but a perfectly average amount for a private school of its size, as opposed to your claim it has none.

My high school has ~1500 students and two guards. One is a police officer tasked to the school (probably one of those “special police officers”), and the other is an unarmed dude that mostly just handles kids skipping class or smoking weed on campus.

High risk schools would be schools with high gang related violence, and/or high violence areas. Or possible schools that have that have kids like the president’s daughters would need armed guards, were there is a substantial risk of someone trying to attack them.

Even then I understand why people would want to have armed guards there, but I don’t think that they would do much.

A few NRA supporters are Democrats/liberals in all other respects, but most aren’t, so it’s pretty weird to see them make an egalitarian argument here. What would a Republican make of the same point regarding children’s health care? I guess the libertarian viewpoint is not that kids have a birthright to be protected by guns in school, but that parents should be able to make the choice, just like the right to choose whether or not to work hard enough to afford healthcare for your kids. Or something.

Nobody is getting a full-body x-ray at airport security. Baggage is x-rayed. But the scanners for people are low-frequency magnetic field instruments (metal detectors), air puffers (to pick up particles of explosives/drugs), millimeter interferometers (passive imaging of body heat through clothing with high sensitivity but low resolution), and backscatter x-ray imaging (which is competing with the millimeter interferometers). The radiation dose from a backscatter scanner is many times less than that from medical transmission radiography. It is also 1% of the dose from an average flight; and about equal to the dose you have absorbed in the last hour (unless you’re inside a low-activity bunker or using inflight wifi right now). So it can be considered negligible.

Airport security is largely security theater. But this all is irrelevant to the insanity that is American gun politics. So we now return to the regularly-scheduled thread.

You have to be very, very careful, especially when you’re talking about the president’s children, but the bigger point that they’re trying to make here is that the president’s children do not go to school in a gun-free zone.

(“[T]hey’re trying to make” refers, of course, to the NRA)
She’s using the term “gun-free zone” a little loosely here, I think, in a sort of vernacular sense. “Gun-free zone” has a pretty strict legal definition, and none of the specific applications in that legal definition prohibit people whose positions require them to carry guns (police, Secret Service agents, etc.) from doing so. So, in fact, the President’s children do still go to school in a gun-free zone. And, in further fact, having armed guards in any school still wouldn’t mean that school wasn’t a gun-free zone (legally). There can be debate over whether or not that’s a good idea, and I guess a lot of it would depend on the level of training, pay, and so on of the guards; but it wouldn’t violate the strict legal definition of “gun-free zone.”
Their “bigger point” is just another, bigger level of wrong, I think (though IANAL)

Its almost like these morons think guns are not just, as they claim, some sort of defense thing, but prophylactics. I.e.:

1. Non-crazy people won’t *go* crazy, if they own a gun.
2. People who are not depressed, won’t become depressed, if they own a gun.
3. People that get really angry and want to hit someone, won’t get that angry, and say.. shoot someone instead, if they own a gun.

Along with this are other equally stupid assumptions:

1. Criminals are different than normal people, so it should be possible to screen out the normal ones, from the criminals (except, they don’t want background checks, in certain cases, so I have no frakking clue how they figure this would work).
2. Mentally ill people are obvious, or well known, or already all identified (see #1 and #2 in the first list), so there is no need to do anything *to* try to identify them.
3. No one that isn’t already in the above categories, even if they are sitting in a compound, hoarding guns, and talking about black helicopters, are, or will become, criminals, or mentally ill (which goes right back to the “guns are prophylactic” argument.

Oh, and, we can add in one more: Professionals, like cops, guards, or… teachers, are incapable of being criminal, or depressed, or insane, and, more to the point, won’t become so in the future, so there is no need to worry that arming any of them might lead to.. say, they becoming the next shooter.

None of those ideas being reality based, sane themselves, or even vaguely believable, except, apparently, to the NRA and other people that argue for everyone having guns, even while they argue against real training, real background checks, or, given the number of them that are probably Tea Party as well, real mental health care, never mind early detection of problems.

All, in all, the only people more delusional seem to be, say, Wall Street Journal authors, when talking about average incomes.

Dragging the children of a Democratic President into policy discussions has been going on since Amy Carter and the treehouse.

Ah, but it’s only improper when it’s against those you agree with, when it’s the opposition, they’re “fair game”.

When the daughters of the Bush brothers were caught trying to illicitly buy alcohol (Dubya’s) and xanax (Jeb’s), it was considered “insulting” and “unfair”. And when the wilful ignorance of Meghan McCain (thankfully not a president’s daughter) was shown up on Bill Maher’s show, she and the right tried to portray it as an attack upon her personally, not a valid correction of what she said.